The Man in the Monster (13 page)

Sometime in that second year, Betsy changed. Michael later suggested that perhaps both of them began to become more secure—or entrenched—in their personalities. “I think she outgrew me,” he admitted. No longer was Betsy the impressionable freshman who had written the love letter describing their shared dream of life on the farm in Brooklyn. Marriage, kids, and the farm were not enough. She began to think of their future in terms of her own career. She constantly complained about the prospect of being “stuck in Hicksville,” her sardonic term for Brooklyn. The more they talked of marriage, the more she felt that Michael was tying her down. And Michael was no longer the teenage boy infatuated with love. His goal was less about pleasing Betsy and more about protecting what he saw as his vision of a perfect future.

Betsy pushed Michael to agree that after she graduated, they would choose where to live based on who made the highest salary. Half joking, half serious, she'd refer to him as her future “house hubby.” Michael would laugh and shrug it off, but the thought of being forced to follow her career infuriated him. He didn't want to give in to her competitiveness; he wanted to go back to Brooklyn and take over the farm, while Betsy wanted to become an executive in agribusiness. “If she had said, go with me or we go our separate ways, I would have gone. But I
was afraid if I told her, I would have given her the upper hand. That's what I was afraid of. I didn't want her to know how much power she had over me, how much I cared. I was madly in love—or I thought I was. Now I think it was infatuation, sexual attraction, and nothing else,” Michael decided. “The problem was that she was too much like my mother. She was too controlling, too competitive.

“I had always dreamed of returning to the farm. It's all that I had ever wanted. I had no big dreams. I was going to be the next generation. I was going to build new buildings and make the farm state of the art, as it had been when we started building in the sixties.” But to satisfy Betsy, Michael began interviewing during the fall semester.

Adding to Michael's turmoil was news that his parents had decided to separate and were in the process of divorce. Michael never knew exactly what prompted the decision but assumed that they just couldn't stand each other anymore. Both Pat and Dan were telling Michael not to come back to Brooklyn to work at Eggs, Inc. after graduation. “My Dad was pressing me to interview. He said he wanted something better for me, maybe because he was proud of me. I don't think he understood that I didn't want anything more than to go back to Brooklyn and settle down and raise a family like he had done.” By Christmas Michael had landed a job with Cargill, Incorporated, one of the largest agricultural conglomerates in the country, in the poultry products division in North Carolina. Betsy was happy. Pat and Dan were pleased. Only Michael was miserable about his success.

Police reports from the time of Michael's arrest in 1984 reveal that a relative of Pat's and a few neighbors saw a change in Michael after the divorce. They said he appeared even more hostile toward Pat and blamed her for the divorce, but later he claimed to have no memory of an abrupt shift in his feelings toward her. He simply felt he was twenty-one years old and didn't have to answer to her anymore. However, the
divorce proceedings later became even more upsetting. Pat wanted 50 percent of the farm even if that meant selling it. The prospect of losing what he saw as his future added to the strain on his relationship with Betsy. Now both Betsy and his mother were destroying his dreams.

Michael became increasingly withdrawn. During his junior year, he loved going out and dancing. But more and more by his senior year, he wanted to stay home in their apartment. Betsy resented the change.

The pressure of living together was overwhelming. Soon he would graduate, and they would be separated by hundreds of miles. A sense of loneliness and abandonment haunted him. He even began to suspect that she was seeing another man on the side. “Betsy was a flirt,” he said, “and I got suspicious when she said some guy wanted to take pictures of her, but she wouldn't let me go. She said it would be awkward. But I never did see any of those pictures.”

They fought as the relationship unraveled. On one occasion, Michael was drunk but determined to drive home to Connecticut. Trying to protect him from himself, Betsy hid the car keys. Unbearable anger welled up inside him. He wanted to hurt her, but she had too much power over him. Her love helped to define him; losing Betsy would be like death. So instead of force, he used words, trying to tear at her emotionally, going for the emotional jugular like his mother. “I fantasized forcing my penis in her mouth, making her relive her demons.” Finally, the fight over the keys became so nasty that Betsy got scared and called one of the Alpha Zeta brothers to come to the apartment to help her. It made me uncomfortable knowing about his fantasy—not because of the mention of forced oral sex, but because it was the first indication that he consciously wanted to hurt a woman who was important in his life.

During another fight, he said he actually hit her with an open-hand
slap to the face, hard enough to knock off her glasses. “I remember feeling so rotten—angry at myself that I hit her, angry at her for getting me so angry—that I left the apartment and walked around campus,” he told me, ashamed of even remembering the rage. “I think that was one of the first times I stalked a woman.”

In a police interview after Michael was arrested, Betsy said that he had a “violent temper.” She told them that he got so angry on one occasion that he “violently choked her and on another occasion he struck her with his fist across the face.” Another time he got mad about something “petty” and tore their apartment apart. Michael couldn't remember all his fights with Betsy but conceded that “if she said it happened, it happened.”

In an effort to salvage the relationship, before Christmas Michael secretly purchased an engagement ring for several hundred dollars. “We had looked at engagement rings weeks before and I purchased a ring that she liked,” he remembered. He had given her the impression that he needed more cash to be able to buy the ring. Michael said she expected a ring, but not right away. The drive from Ithaca to Brooklyn took six hours, and he knew that Betsy would often get kind of grouchy during those long drives. “So I put the ring in the glove compartment. Three or four hours into the drive, when she started to get a bit testy, I had her open the glove compartment and find the ring. Needless to say, her mood improved greatly, and we found a secluded place to pull over and make love. I suppose that doesn't sound very romantic, no formal proposal during a candlelit dinner, but the ring was just a formality. It was my way of hanging on to our relationship. I wanted to do something to hold us together. We got engaged, but we weren't honest with each other.”

Betsy was aware of the growing problems in their relationship, but she did not know that there was an even greater problem growing within
Michael. His fantasies had become increasingly aggressive and sadistic since Rachel's abortion. Despite his active sex life, he continued to masturbate to the growing violence in his head. “Rape became incorporated into my fantasies after I met Betsy my junior year. I knew firsthand how the rape in Washington had affected her, how she still could get frightened even months and years after the attack,” he remembered. Knowing her fears gave him both a physical and emotional power over her.

Most of the time, sex for Michael was an expression of love, but it also became a power game. He used it to control Betsy. She said he demanded sex from her twice a day. When he was angry or displeased, he would force sex on her. It was his way of punishing her, his way of gaining the upper hand in their relationship. “It was wrong and I wish now that I could tell her that I am sorry,” he lamented. “On occasion, I used sex to hurt her. In my fantasies, sex became a way to degrade a woman. And while I was never as aggressive with Betsy as I was in my fantasies, some of that spilled over into our relationship. There were times when I was angry and wanted to hurt her, more emotionally than physically, but I would only go so far.” He depended on her and needed her, yet she was making him miserable.

As Michael's anger and frustration with Betsy increased, the fantasies and the urges became a constant torment. Now the fantasies were not only of degradation and rape, but also of murder. “The best way for someone who is not plagued with this problem to understand the obsessive and repetitive nature of these thoughts, urges, and fantasies is to remember a time when you had a song or some catchy tune stuck in your mind, playing over and over and over again, driving you crazy. Even if you like the melody, its constant repetition becomes more than merely annoying. When this happens, the harder you try to push that melody out of your mind, the louder and more persistent it becomes, driving you almost to the point of madness,” he told me. However,
it wasn't a catchy tune playing in Michael's head, but noxious images of physically and mentally degrading women, of raping and strangling them—images that are nearly impossible for the average person to imagine.

“In my fantasies I did not have to hold back like I did with Betsy, so they continued to grow. Somehow, and I don't really know how it happened, fantasy spilled out into reality. Stalking was the first step.” Stalking relieved the internal pressure when his relationship with Betsy was tense.

“When I was very agitated, stalking relaxed me. It started out as a game—to follow a woman without her knowing. Afterwards, the incident would feed my masturbation fantasies. Slowly, the game developed into how close I could get to the woman without her knowing. There were times when I got so close that I could have easily grabbed her. Then the game became to see how close I could get to her while thinking of what I could do to her. Then there were times that I deliberately let the woman know that I was following her, and it was such a rush to be able to feel her fear.” All these incidents would later be incorporated into fantasies that he masturbated to. He began to feel as if he were separated from the act of stalking, almost as if he were watching it all happen. This sense of separation from the actual acts might have been the first indication of what Dr. Merikangas would later describe as a fugue-like state or depersonalization disorder, in which reality testing remains intact but one feels as if one were outside oneself or watching a movie rather than participating in the action.

Michael had been in denial about the seriousness of his desire to stalk. He was convinced that it was just a harmless game and that he would never hurt anyone. He said he had no fear of being discovered or recognized. Somehow taking off his glasses and being one of six thousand students made him feel unrecognizable. “As time went on, I
had to get closer to them. Like a drug, I needed more and more to gain the same release. From then on, it wasn't enough just to follow them. I had to frighten them. When I was stalking or masturbating, I craved that feeling. It was as if I could feed on their fear.”

“Finally, I actually grabbed one,” he admitted, although he wasn't exactly sure when it happened. “It was after dark but probably before midnight. I felt an irresistible impulse to stalk. A young woman left the Agriculture library alone and walked into the parking lot behind the building. I followed her and grabbed her from behind as she turned between two parked cars. I covered her mouth and dragged her to the ground. I remember being frightened at what I had done. I hadn't planned on grabbing her. I was only supposed to follow her and maybe frighten her by making my presence known. So when I had her on the ground, I didn't know what to do. I became frightened and ran off into the night.” Although Michael did not rape the woman, he had begun to re-create the scenario of Betsy's attack.

In court testimony, Dr. Borden said that becoming sexually active was the initial trigger for Michael's “core personality” to come to the surface. “There were serious problems in his . . . psychological structure that has to do with relationships.” Michael had acted out when he reached puberty at thirteen and fondled his neighbor, suggesting that there was “an underlying personality disturbance core.” Dr. Borden said that when he became sexually active, the underlying personality core took over. “It comes out in relationships. It comes out in the interaction, because that provokes and stimulates feelings. That can set the whole thing in motion.” He explained that if a woman was accommodating and “let him dominate her” in the way Rachel did, his mental illness would be controlled and pacified. She was “sexually comforting and built his ego.”

Michael's fear of losing Betsy was important in understanding his mental illness. “We have a honeymoon period where [Betsy] serves to
control him. That relationship keeps him together. Just like his mother kept him together.” He might have resented it, but his mother kept him under her thumb. “A woman can keep him together for a while. If she's . . . basically accommodating, it can be for a longer period of time. If she's more like his mother, that's like a fuse or a trigger for him. It's like a grenade and the woman is the pin. It arms him, but it controls him. When that pin is pulled, leaves, separates, he's going to explode.” Betsy was the pin.

The “monster” was strong and powerful, capable of controlling women. Michael, on the other hand, felt weak because he was losing control of Betsy and his future life in Brooklyn. The frustration, powerlessness, and rage that he experienced as his world slipped away only fueled his need to keep the monster alive. He had the same push/pull relationship with the monster that he had with his mother.

Although Michael was becoming aware that he and Betsy were mismatched, he would later object to Dr. Borden or any psychiatrist or observer describing Betsy as any part of the problem. He said he was the problem and insisted she had nothing to do with it.

A few weeks after the first attack, Michael was again in his stalking mode when he followed a woman off campus and down Thurston Avenue toward the Alpha Zeta house. “I grabbed her from behind and dragged her into a grassy area just across the street from the fraternity. The thrill was in the pursuit and in seeing and feeling her terrors as I pulled her off the path. It all happened so quickly.” Almost immediately, he let her go, again without hurting or raping her, and ran off through some nearby woods. These attacks were reported to the Cornell police, who filed reports and did some investigation, but not until after Michael's arrest in 1984 did they know all had been committed by the same man.